Zero Complaints About P2P Lending Companies

This morning I took a look through the Financial Ombudsman‘s complaints data to see if customers were complaining about any specific peer-to-peer lending companies.

I tried over a dozen of the biggest names, including Zopa, RateSetter, Funding Circle, LendInvest, Wellesley and more.

I found no decisions – either for or against any of them – by the ombudsman since April 2014. That was when customers were first allowed to take P2P complaints to the ombudsman.

We're talking about hundreds of thousands of lender and borrower customers, and yet I can't find a single complaint that had to be decided by the consumer body.

Either zero complaints, or very close to zero

This doesn't mean that no one complained to the ombudsman at all. The record of a complaint only shows up if the ombudsman had to make a decision for or against the complainant.

Normally, the ombudsman just has to help the two parties to understand each other better and then they resolve the situation between themselves.

However, typically around 30%-40% of disputes are resolved in the customers' favour. (Much more for some other complaints, like self-invested personal pensions.) If customers were complaining to the ombudsman about any P2P lending companies, we would surely have seen a least a few ombudsman decisions show up in the records.

It's reassuring to see the initial data matches the overall enthusiasm that we have, and others seem to have, about P2P lending.

If you have any complaint abut a financial company and you can't get it resolved, I highly recommend you get in touch with the powerful ombudsman, who can fix it for you.